A robust visual servo control scheme with prescribed performance for an autonomous underwater vehicle

This paper describes the design and implementation of a visual servo control scheme for an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV). The purpose of the control scheme is to navigate and stabilize the vehicle towards a visual target. The controller does not utilize the vehicle´s dynamic model parameters and guarantees prescribed transient and steady state performance despite the presence of external disturbances representing ocean currents and waves. The proposed control scheme is of low complexity and can be easily integrated to an embedded control platform of an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) with limited power and computational resources. Moreover, through the appropriate selection of certain performance functions, the proposed scheme guarantees that the target lies inside the onboard camera´s field of view for all time. The resulting control scheme has analytically guaranteed stability and convergence properties, while its applicability and performance are experimentally verified using the Girona 500 AUV.